3,393 research outputs found
Ejectives in Scottish English: a social perspective
This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-Ĺ‹k/ cluster (e.g. tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years
Investigations into colour constancy by bridging human and computer colour vision
PhD ThesisThe mechanism of colour constancy within the human visual system has long been of great interest to researchers within the psychophysical and image processing communities. With the maturation of colour imaging techniques for both scientific and artistic applications the importance of colour capture accuracy has consistently increased. Colour offers a great deal more information for the viewer than grayscale imagery, ranging from object detection to food ripeness and health estimation amongst many others.
However these tasks rely upon the colour constancy process in order to discount scene illumination to allow these tasks to be carried out. Psychophysical studies have attempted to uncover the inner workings of this mechanism, which would allow it to be reproduced algorithmically. This would allow the development of devices which can eventually capture and perceive colour in the same manner as a human viewer.
These two communities have approached this challenge from opposite ends, and as such very different and largely unconnected approaches. This thesis investigates the development of studies and algorithms which bridge the two communities. Utilising findings from psychophysical studies as inspiration to firstly improve an existing image enhancement algorithm. Results are then compared to state of the art methods. Then, using further knowledge, and inspiration, of the human visual system to develop a novel colour constancy approach. This approach attempts to mimic and replicate the mechanism of colour constancy by investigating the use of a physiological colour space and specific scene contents to estimate illumination. Performance of the colour constancy mechanism within the visual system is then also investigated. The performance of the mechanism across different scenes and commonly and uncommonly encountered illuminations is tested.
The importance of being able to bridge these two communities, with a successful colour constancy method, is then further illustrated with a case study investigating the human visual perception of the agricultural produce of tomatoes.EPSRC DTA:
Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University
The shade of the palm: songs from Florodora
https://digitalcommons.ithaca.edu/sheetmusic/1202/thumbnail.jp
The Shade of the Palm
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/6565/thumbnail.jp
Implementation and Effectiveness of Interpersonal Psychotherapy in a Community Mental Health Service
Objective: Although the efficacy of a number of psychotherapeutic interventions
has been well established in tightly controlled, randomized trials,
there remains a paucity of literature examining the effectiveness of these
interventions in community practice settings. In light of this, the Australian
Capital Territory Mental Health Services (Canberra, ACT) set out to investigate
the effectiveness of an empirically supported psychotherapeutic intervention,
interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT). The present study describes a
pilot evaluation of the training programme for health professionals and the
IPT treatment programme.
Methods: Forty community mental health professionals participated in
intensive IPT training. Clinicians who completed a course of supervision
were asked to apply the treatment with non-psychotic acutely depressed
patients. Measures of patients’ health outcomes were taken before and after
treatment using a standardized outcome measure.
Results: A total of 17 out of 21 patients who were selected completed a
course of 12–16 weeks of IPT. The majority of the patients had a depression
originating in the post-partum period. A comparison of pre- and posttreatment
scores of treatment completers revealed a significant decrease in mean
depression scores. Clinicians who completed a course of training and supervision
found that they were able to confidently apply IPT in a clinical setting.
Conclusions: Although there were a number of barriers and obstacles to
the introduction of an evidenced-based treatment, the results are promising
and demonstrate that IPT can be readily taught to experienced mental health
professionals. Further study is required to determine the feasibility of IPT
in other non-academic settings using larger sample sizes and homogenous
groups of patients
Density-and trait-mediated effects of a parasite and a predator in a tri-trophic food web
1. Despite growing interest in ecological consequences of parasitism in food webs, relatively little is known about effects of parasites on long-term population dynamics of non-host species or about whether such effects are density- or trait- mediated.
2. We studied a tri-trophic food chain comprised of: (i) a bacterial basal resource (Serratia fonticola), (ii) an intermediate consumer (Paramecium caudatum), (iii) a top predator (Didinium nasutum), and (iv) a parasite of the intermediate consumer (Holospora undulata). A fully-factorial experimental manipulation of predator and parasite presence/absence was combined with analyses of population dynamics, modelling, and analyses of host (Paramecium) morphology and behavior.
3. Predation and parasitism each reduced the abundance of the intermediate consumer (Paramecium), and parasitism indirectly reduced the abundance of the basal resource (Serratia). However, in combination, predation and parasitism had non-additive effects on the abundance of the intermediate consumer, as well as on that of the basal resource. In both cases, the negative effect of parasitism seemed to be effaced by predation.
4. Infection of the intermediate consumer reduced predator abundance. Modelling and additional experimentation revealed that this was most likely due to parasite reduction of intermediate host abundance (a density-mediated effect), as opposed to changes in predator functional or numerical response.
5. Parasitism altered morphological and behavioural traits, by reducing host cell length and increasing the swimming speed of cells with moderate parasite loads. Additional tests showed no significant difference in Didinium feeding rate on infected and uninfected hosts, suggesting that the combination of these modifications does not affect host vulnerability to predation. However, estimated rates of encounter with Serratia based on these modifications were higher for infected Paramecium than for uninfected Paramecium.
6. A mixture of density-mediated and trait-mediated indirect effects of parasitism on non- host species creates rich and complex possibilities for effects of parasites in food webs that should be included in assessments of possible impacts of parasite eradication or introduction
Populous: A tool for populating ontology templates
We present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to populate an
ontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in its
form, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation.
Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns are
constrained to take values from particular ontologies; the user can select a
concept from an ontology via its meaningful label to give a value for a given
entity attribute. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be used
to automatically generate the ontology's content. Populous's contribution is in
the knowledge gathering stage of ontology development. It separates knowledge
gathering from the conceptualisation and also separates the user from the
standard ontology authoring environments. As a result, Populous can allow
knowledge to be gathered in a straight-forward manner that can then be used to
do mass production of ontology content.Comment: in Adrian Paschke, Albert Burger begin_of_the_skype_highlighting
end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Andrea Splendiani, M. Scott Marshall, Paolo
Romano: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web
Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences, Berlin,Germany, December 8-10,
201
Verbal Dialogue versus Written Dialogue
Modern technology has moved on and completely changed the way that people can use the telephone
or mobile to dialogue with information held on computers. Well developed “written speech analysis” does not work
with “verbal speech”. The main purpose of our article is, firstly, to highlights the problems and, secondly, to shows
the possible ways to solve these problems
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